Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
As i lay dying characters essay
How faulkner's life influenced his writing
How faulkner's life influenced his writing
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: As i lay dying characters essay
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner
In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, characterization, specifically through the multitude of narrators, transforms an otherwise pedestrian plot into a complex pilgrimage to the truth. As I Lay Dying is told from the perspective of fifteen different characters in 59 chapters (Tuck 35). Nearly half (7) of the characters from whose perspective the story is narrated are members of the same family, the Bundrens. The other characters are onlookers of the Bundrens’ journey to bury their mother, Addie. Each character responds to the events that are unfolding in a unique way and his or her reactions help to characterize themselves and others.
“…each private world manifests a fixed and distinctive way of reacting to and ordering experiences” (Vickery 50). They may choose to constrain their reaction to the realm of audible indulgence in the form of word, through the actions they take, or by reflecting upon the situation in contemplation. These responses shed light upon what kind of personality each character possesses.
On a conscious level the characters make decisions based upon three criteria. They can act on sensation, they can use reason for guidance, or they can act upon their innate intuition. “Faulkner is able to indicate the particular combination of sensation, reason, and intuition possessed by each of his characters… through a subtle manipulation of language and style” (Vickery 51). Faulkner portrays each character through their thought process and thus characterizes them as the product of their choices.
The eight non-Bundrens, friends, neighbors, and onlookers alike, are employed by Faulkner to characterize the family members, however the credence of t...
... middle of paper ...
...s against us lazily” (Faulkner 158).
Works Cited
Campbell, Harry Modean, and Ruel E. Foster. A Critical Appraisal. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1970
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York; Vintage Books, 1985
Kinney, Arthur F. Faulkner’s Narrative Poetics Style as Vision. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978
Magill, Frank N. “William Faulkner.” Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Englewood Cliffs: American Libraries, 1985
Morris, Wesley. Reading Faulkner. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
Tuck, Dorothy. Crowell’s Handbook of Faulkner. New York; Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1964
Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of William Faulkner A Critical Interpretation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959
Wadlington, Warwick. As I Lay Dying: Stories out of Stories. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992
Upon listening and reading William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, it is immediately deduced that he provides his vast audience of the epitome of himself. William Faulkner is not someone, but everyone. His humanistic approach to writing and thought has allowed him to hide complexity within simplicity, and for this, he is memorable: his work is a true testament to the unbreakable nature of the human spirit in the face of enormous hardship and consequence; a look into the human mind that is simultaneously interesting and uninteresting. This, along with so much more, is prevalent in this speech, which perfectly conveys the responsibilities of the writers in 1949.
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. He wrote a variety of short stories, plays, and novels, including the classic As I Lay Dying. This innovative novel, published in 1930, has a sense of dark humour and shock value. It has an unconventional narrative style, with 15 first person narrators. As I Lay Dying features The Bundrens, an incredibly poor family who live on their farm in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional county in Mississippi. The family matriarch, Addie Bundren, dies early in the novel. The rest of the story is based on her family- her husband, Anse, and their five children: Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman, and their attempt to fulfill her wish of being buried in Jefferson. They must transport her coffin on a wagon across the county, a trip which takes a total of ten days. They encounter many obstacles during their journey, all while trying to deal with the death of their recently passed mother. While the whole family goes to Jefferson for varying motivations, it seems that Jewel is the driving force of the journey, which Darl does everything in his power to sabotage it.
16. James Hinkle and Robert McCoy, Reading Faulkner: The Unvanquished. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 141.
Hewson, Marc. “'My children were of me alone': Maternal Influence in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.” Mississippi Quarterly 54.4 (2001): 595-95. Literature Resources From Gale. Web. 18 Apr. 2010.
By reading closely and paying attention to details, I was able to get so much more out of this story than I did from the first reading. In short, this assignment has greatly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the more complex and subtle techniques Faulkner used to communicated his ideas in the story.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings. 2nd
Analyzing character in a Faulkner novel is like trying to reach the bottom of a bottomless pit because Faulkner's characters often lack ration, speak in telegraphed stream-of-consciousness, and rarely if ever lend themselves to ready analysis. This is particularly true in As I Lay Dying, a novel of a fragmented and dysfunctional family told through fragmented chapters. Each character reveals their perspective in different chapters, but the perspectives are true to life in that though they all reveal information about the Bundren family and their struggles to exist they are all limited by the perspective of the character providing the revelations. The story centers on the death of the mother of the Bundren clan, Addie, whose imminent death creates fragmentation and chaos in the Bundren family because Anse, Addie's husband, has promised to travel to Jefferson to bury her with her family. Floods, fires, injuries and poor decisions mar the journey, but the family endures and Anse brings home a new Mrs. Bundren. However, Anse, often read as the most selfish Bundren is the only one prepared to go on with life and accept Addie's death.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1994. Print
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.
By focusing on the figure of Caddy, Bleikasten’s essay works to understand the ambiguous nature of modern literature, Faulkner’s personal interest in Caddy, and the role she plays as a fictional character in relation to both her fictional brothers and her actual readers. To Bleikasten, Caddy seems to function on multiple levels: as a desired creation; as a fulfillment of what was lacking in Faulkner’s life; and/or as a thematic, dichotomous absence/presence.
A book should not be judged by some words found in the passage, it should be judged bythe overall message and plot. Faulkner’s book, As I Lay Dying, is a very unique piece of workthat should not be broken down in parts but to be understood as a whole.William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi. He was also born into a familywhere there had already been writers, he would always say he wanted to be a writer just like his“granddaddy” (Blotner 9). Even though Falkner was very limited to education, he read a lot ofimportant literature such as: The Greek and Roman classics, the Bible, the works of WilliamShakespeare, the English Romantics, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot (Atchity, “As ILay Dying” Masterplots, Literary Reference
Faulkner's style may give you trouble at first because of (1) his use of long, convoluted, and sometimes ungrammatical sentences, such as the one just quoted; (2) his repetitiveness (for example, the word "bleak" in the sentence just quoted); and (3) his use of oxymorons, that is, combinations of contradictory or incongruous words (for example, "frictionsmooth," "slow and ponderous gallop," "cheerful, testy voice"). People who dislike Faulkner see this style as careless. Yet Faulkner rewrote and revised Light in August many times to get the final book exactly the way he wanted it. His style is a product of thoughtful deliberation, not of haste. Editors sometimes misunderstood Faulkner's intentions and made what they thought were minor changes. Recently scholars have prepared an edition of Light in August that restores the author's original text as exactly as possible. This Book Note is based on that Library of America edition (1985), edited by Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner.
Faulkner first presents an image of time through the character Benjy in “April Seventh, 1928”. Benjy’s interpretation of time stems from his disability to distinguish between past and present. The connections Benjy makes between the differences in time allow him to see through the Compson’s family obsession with their previous greatness, and instead Benjy recognizes the family’s self-destruction. Faulkner illustrates Benjy’s connections by using a stream of consciousness narrative to portray all events, in “April Seventh, 1928”, in the present regardless of when they occurred. Although the events that occurred in the present are insignificant and rather confusing to follow, they evoke memories within Benjy that prove to be both important and enlightening for the reader. On...
Elizabeth: 'I shall be very fit to see Jane - which is all I want' ...
Alienation is a concurrent theme in many of the Faulkner’s novels. He presents us this theme clearly in Light in August with his descriptive choice of setting as we are walked through Jefferson from the Reverend Gail Hightower’s cabin to the mysterious estate of Joanna Burden. The slightly complicated plot tells the story of each character and how they reached to the present time of alienation. And his use of tone, misogynistic in nature, adds to the central theme. Faulkner’s use of these three techniques allowed the reader to recognize and relate to the feeling of alienation.